Don't let the title throw you. Cassandra Quave is an ethnobotanist but her quest is easy to understand. She wants to develop new ways to fight illness and disease. And she wants to do it through the healing powers of plants.
Plants are the basis for an array of lifesaving and health-improving medicines we all now take for granted. Ever taken an aspirin? Thank a willow tree for that. What about life-saving medicines for malaria? Some of those are derived from cinchona and wormwood.
Quave, who teaches at Emory University, suggests that in today’s world of synthetic pharmaceuticals, people have lost their connection to the natural world. By ignoring the potential of medicinal plants, however, we are losing out on the opportunity to discover new life-saving medicines, she says.
Antibiotic-resistant microbes are already a problem. Each year, 700,000 people die due to untreatable infections but by 2050, 10 million annual deaths are expected unless we take action.
In her interview with Steve Tarter, Quave weaves together science, botany, and memoir to tell the extraordinary story of her own journey. Traveling by canoe, ATV, mule, airboat, and on foot, she has conducted field research in the flooded forests of the remote Amazon, the murky swamps of southern Florida and isolated mountaintops in Albania and Kosovo—all in search of natural compounds, long-known to traditional healers.
She's also the co-creator and host of "Foodie Pharmacology," a podcast dedicated to exploring links between food and medicine.
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